“I never abstract from nature; I never consciously think of nature when I paint.”

If we depart form tradition, it is out of knowledge, not innocence.

My favorite symbols were those which I didn’t understand.

It seems tome they are more concerned that we should go back, than about nature.

Painting is self-discovery.

In times of violence, personal predilections for niceties of colour and form seem irrelevant.

I use color in terms of emotional quality, as a vehicle for feeling…

All primitive expression (like the myths) reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces,

Feeling is everything I have experienced or thought.

You arrive at the image through the act of painting.

I want to express the utmost intensity of the color, bring out the quality, make it expressive.

I never use nature as a starting point.

Certain people always say we should go back to nature.I notice they never say we should go forward to nature.

The immediate presence of terror and fear.

I don’t like [to] make a woman … an abstract concept of the fashion. I don’t like [to] say, “You must wear that.” … I am not a dictator.

Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.

I am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an easy matter.

Whitman was Emerson translated from the abstract into the concrete.

Although the theory of relativity makes the greatest of demands on the ability for abstract thought, still it fulfills the traditional requirements of science insofar as it permits a division of the world into subject and object (observer and observed) and, hence, a clear formulation of the law of causality.

How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.

An abstract style is always bad. Your sentences should be full of stones, metals, chairs, tables, animals, men, and women.

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.